Capsa v8.2 is capable of analyzing the traffic of wireless AP with 2 channels. Users can choose up to 2 wireless channels to analyze the total traffic which greatly enhances the accuracy of wireless traffic analysis. Hex display of decoded data is added in Data Flow sub-view in TCP/UDP Conversation view. Users can switch the display format between hex and text in Capsa v8.2.

Besides the optimizations of Data Flow sub-view in TCP/UDP Conversation view, with the continuous improvement of CSTRE (Colasoft Traffic Recognition Engine), Capsa 8.2 is capable of recognizing up to 1546 protocols and sub-protocols, which covers most of the mainstream protocols.

“We have also enhanced the interface of Capsa which improves user experience”, said Brian K. Smith, Vice President at Colasoft LLC, “the release of Capsa v8.2 provides a more comprehensive network analyze result to our customers.”

“Colasoft’s Capsa is a very good product which is worth the price. It could make deep analysis of Network and display very good intuitive interface. Capsa helps me to understand about the real-time situations of the Network.”

Company Brief

As a member of the Panasonic family, Universal Lighting Technologies, Inc. (Universal) is committed to the highest quality, leading edge research and development. With a comprehensive product line and a team of experts standing by to customize its technology to specific needs, Universal can provide the perfect lighting solution to maximize energy savings in any commercial or industrial application, including compact and linear fluorescent ballasts, HID and eHID ballasts, and the complete EVERLINE® family of LED light engines, modules, and drivers.

The Challenge

Universal is a company with multiple locations and is connected by MPLS Wan Network. To analyze the complicated Network, Universal needs a Network analyzer which has intuitive and simple real-time graphic dashboard with deep analysis.

Comparing with other network analyze products which Universal used before, a product which is easy to implement and tune up and displays clear graphic is what it needs. Also, Universal plan to display a network dashboard in a big TV to monitor the real-time network behavior.

The Solution

The Full Screen Interface with a lot of predefined metrics to plot of Colasoft Capsa is what Universal is searching for. Capsa could analyze network in real-time with threshold to send alerts of abnormal behaviors and display a nice graphic interface dashboard.

Simple to implement, Colasoft Capsa helps the IT experts in Universal well understand what is happening in the network. Besides, the sound alters and email alerts of Capsa helps IT experts to find out what is out of the normal Network flow.

“Colasoft’s products offer several tools to help us identify devices and traffic anomalies on our network. They also offer the Wi-Fi application to assist in further network issues or privacy concerns. Colasoft’s Capsa is affordable and efficient!”

– Benjamin Shumaker, NISO, Credit Union of Denver

Company Brief

As one of Colorado’s oldest and largest member-owned financial cooperatives, Credit Union of Denver provides its members with more overall value in the form of excellent rates, outstanding service, superior products and convenient access. By leveraging over 81 years of experience to keep operating costs low, membership returns high, and by making member satisfaction a top priority, Credit Union of Denver makes achieving financial goals smarter and more rewarding than ever before.

The Challenge

As a credit union, Credit Union of Denver needs quick identification of potential problems. They use multiple PC based applications as well as 3rd party browser based interfaces that require secure, fast, smooth delivery results. Changes to their environment can lead to negative impact on performance of network related information. Therefore, trying to identify the offending application or network breakdown is an urgent challenge of Credit Union of Denver.

The Solution

Comparing with some network analyzer they used before, Credit Union of Denver would like to choose a network analyzer which is easy to understand and adapt. The user-friendly interface of Capsa is what they want.

In the fast-paced financial industry, everything needs a quick result. By using Capsa, Credit Union of Denver is able to immediately identify applications which are inefficient and causing lots of unnecessary network traffic. Colasoft’s Capsa helps the company identify performance issues on network and save time at pin pointing the applications or networks causing the problem.

Voice

“The look and feel was great. Ability to capture packets, inspect, and diagnose were impressive. The overall Mapping ability to see where all the traffic is flowing, most popular hits, or congestive areas were visible.”

“Colasoft’s Capsa is exactly what we are looking for. After the first time using it, we just stopped searching for any other network analysis software. It is a great product with competitive price. Besides, Colasoft’s Capsa is easy to implement and has a lot of features and very good reports.”

– Vinicius Barrado, IT Director, TripleTech IT Solutions

Company Brief

TripleTech IT Solutions offers outsourcing and consulting/services in network, security and database.

The Challenge

As a consulting and outsourcing company, TripleTech IT Solutions needs software which could analysis clients network in an easy and clear way and counts a lot whether the software could provide them a detail report. Besides, TripleTech IT Solutions needs software which could cost less time to generate reports of network.

The Solution

Easy to implement, Colasoft Capsa gives a quick report which is the principal criteria for TripleTech IT Solutions to find a network analyzer.

After using Capsa, business process Network analysis of TripleTech IT Solutions is enhanced, because it saves TripleTech IT Solutions a lot of time and money in producing the final report for their clients.

UPM v4.1 is capable of monitoring service quality of all aspects of a business network, quickly detecting and pinpointing problems affecting performance and stability of key business segments.

November 24th, 2015 – Colasoft LLC, a leading provider of innovative and affordable network analysis solutions, announces the release of a new business-oriented network performance management solution today. This new technology, known as Colasoft Unified Performance Management (UPM), partners best with our existing product, Colasoft nChronos. It collects all analysis data from nChronos, summarizes the data and displays the final results onto the dashboard.

Colasoft UPM is able to Visualize Business Running Status which enhances network management by providing a more business-oriented network management compared to most physical-oriented network management. This enables users to make proactive network analysis decisions based on each business system monitored. Operations staff have the capability to know the running quality of every single business segment at any time by displayed graphs and charts of the running status of business elements.

With the Quick Analysis of Business Performance Problem function, Colasoft UPM graphically displays the running status of all the applications which form a business network. With UPM graphs, users can view the application services, hosts and network paths supporting business systems. Colasoft UPM also supports graphic displays of key performance indexes and working status of all business elements, to help users quickly locate the root cause of the business system anomaly.

“In the fast growing network technology area, the combination of network and business systems are now intertwined.” said Brian K. Smith, Vice President of Colasoft LLC, “Today’s complex, hybrid networks require a more sophisticated technology to manage business networks. Colasoft UPM provides the solution that allows industry to deal with a rapidly growing network problem.”

About UPM

Colasoft Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform is a business-oriented network performance management solution. It is capable of monitoring service quality for all aspects of a business network and quickly detecting and pinpointing problems affecting performance and stability within key business segments. UPM will maximize business network management efficiency and network fault troubleshooting capability by providing business-centered network analysis supporting environment review, real-time performance monitoring and the quick detection of network faults. Colasoft UPM collects all real-time analysis data from Colasoft nChronos which is deployed across each network node providing operations staff with vivid and graphic views of every node in the business network.

Tulsa, OK – December 1, 2015 – Colasoft LLC (www.colasoft.com), an innovative provider of powerful and affordable network analysis solutions, today announced the release of its flagship product Colasoft nChronos Network Forensic Analysis Application v5.0. The OS architecture is greatly optimized in this version which helps make network monitoring and analysis much more convenient and efficient than ever before. This release comes with groundbreaking functional design and analysis processing technology, such as twin-engine application protocol analysis and the new customizable analysis views.

nChronos v5.0 provides high-performance network analysis for Cloud-Computing Datacenters by supporting 10 Gbps+ linear analysis with a new system architecture and processing engine, nanosecond-level analysis of packets, multi-link analysis technology and flexible storage capacity. It’s the perfect solution for high performance Cloud-Computing Datacenters which are in need of higher precision analysis. This new version provides an even greater user experience with many functionality improvements. Below are some of the highlights for nChronos v5.0:

• Added Statistics between Segments tab in the Link Analysis view.

• Supports customized field in the Reports view.

• Advanced Filter in the Link Analysis view.

• Supports quick report generation in the Link Analysis view.

• Graphs can be displayed and exported in the Link Analysis view.

• Supports View Management.

Users can choose to display or hide the views as well as set displaying orders. “For customers with demanding requirements for the high availability and operation of their data centers, nChronos is an ideal choice”, said Brandon Lewis, Director of Customer Services at Colasoft, “With nChronos, every single packet that goes through a user’s network is captured, recorded and able to be reviewed at any time.” An evaluation version of nChronos 5.0 is available for download on Colasoft website at www.colasoft.com.

ARP attacks and ARP flooding are common problems small and large networks are faced with. ARP attackstarget specific hosts byusing their MAC address and responding on their behalf, while at the same time flooding the network with ARP requests. ARP attacks are frequently used for ‘Man-in-the-middle‘ attacks, causing serious security threats, loss of confidential information and should be therefore quickly identified and mitigated.

During ARP attacks, users usually experience slow communication on the network and especially when communicating with the host that is being targeted by the attack.

In this article, we will show you how to detect ARP attacks and ARP flooding using a network analyzer such as Colasoft Capsa.

Colasoft Capsa has one great advantage – the ability to identify and present suspicious ARP attacks without any additional processing, which makes identifying, mitigating and troubleshooting much easier.

Download your copy of Colasoft Capsa and discover how easy it is to identify network & security related problems.

The Diagnosis tab provides real-time information and is extremely handy in identifying potential threats, as shown in the screenshot below:

Under the Diagnosis tab, users can click on the Events area and select any suspicious events. When these events are selected, analysis of them (MAC address information in our case) will be displayed on the right as shown above.

In addition to the above analysis, Capsa also provides a dedicated ARP Attack tab, which is used to verify the offending hosts and type of attack as shown below:

Figure 2. ARP Attack tab verifies the security threat.

We can extend our investigation with the use of the Protocol tab, which allows us to drill into the ARP protocol and see which hosts MAC addresses are involved in heavy ARP protocol traffic:

Figure 3. Drilling into ARP attacks.

Finally, double-clicking on a MAC address in the ARP Protocol section will show all packets related to the selected MAC address.

When double-clicking on a MAC address, Capsa presents all packets captured, allowing us to drill-down to more useful information contained in the ARP packet.

Figure 4. Drilling-down into the ARP attack packets.

By selecting the Source IP, in the lower window of the selected packet, we can see the fake IP address 0.136.136.16. This means that any host on the network responding to this packet will be directed to an incorrect and non-existent IP address, indicating an ARP attack of flood.

Download your copy of Colasoft Capsa and discover how easy it is to identify network & security related problems.

If you’re a network administrator, engineer or IT manager, we strongly suggest you try out Colasoft Capsa today and see how easy you can troubleshoot and resolve network problems and security threats such as ARP Attacks and ARP Flooding.

Capsa is a powerful network analyzer for Ethernet analysis, troubleshooting and monitoring. Not only does it provide users with a series of powerful features that help them learn more about improving network security, pinpoint network issues and monitor network activities, but it also features a user-friendly interface that makes using it a breeze. The software is generally targeted at computer professionals and/or teachers who want to learn more about networking technology, protocols, monitoring and security.

Real time monitoring

As a packet sniffer, Capsa is capable of real time packets monitoring and can also presents the data visually by using logs and a GUI for future reference. Given the fact the software is capable if easily analyzing and diagnosing problems on a network, it can tell the user in minutes what is causing it to be slow or if there is an attack that may be the culprit for its poor performance.

In identifying network issues, Capsa can find the top ten local hosts that slow down the network and can also detect whether someone is using a Bit torrent client to download files off the web which is obviously a prime cause of slow network performance.

Safety and security

Should an attack be responsible for the network’s poor performance, the software will immediately locate the packet info and source codes from the host so that the admin can promptly begin investigating the issue. There are 2 types of worms the software can locate, including operating system works and E-mail worms. This functionality is paramount in identifying the infected computers which eventually allows the admin to fix these issues.

Available filters

In order to be able to focus on specific packets, administrators can use a wide range of filters right from Capsa’s dashboard. For instance, admins can monitor real time messages, http requests, E-mail messages and more of the 4 most popular IM apps including YM, ICQ, AIM and MSN.

Other features

There are of course many other features that Capsa incorporates, such as the ability to generate reports of a certain group or global networks automatically, but also customize the data on different charts. As a network administrator, you can also use the software to remotely monitor traffic by installing the application on the business network (on a workstation of course) and using the Remote Desktop Access function.

Conclusion

All in all, Capsa is by far one of the most reliable and simply the best network analyzers out there. Not only does it offer a wide range of improvements that make using it a breeze, but it makes it very easy for anyone who uses it to find the info they need. On top of that, thanks to functions such as reports, Matrix and Diagnosis, it definitely stands out from the large crowd of similar programs available today.

Troubleshooting network problems can be a very difficult and challenging task. While most IT engineers use a network analyzer to help solve network problems, whenanalyzing hundreds or thousands of packets, it can become very hard to locate and further research conversations between hosts. Colasoft’s Capsa v8 now introduces a new feature that allows us to highlight-colorize relevant IP conversations in the network based on their MAC address, IP Addresses, TCP or UDP conversations.

This great new feature will allow IT engineers to quickly find the related packets of the conversations they want to analyze emphatically, using just a few clicks.

As shown in the screenshot below, users can colorize any Conversation in the MAC Conversation View, IP Conversation View, TCP Conversation View and UDP Conversation View. Packets related to that Conversation will be colorized automatically with the same color.

Take TCP conversation for example, choose one conversation, right-click it and choose “Select Conversation Color” in the pop-up menu:

Figure 1. Selecting a Conversation Color in Capsa v8.0

Next, select the color you wish to use to highlight the specific conversation:

Figure 2. Selecting a color

Once the color has been selected, Capsa will automatically find and highlight all related packets of this conversation using the same background color:

Troubleshooting network problems can be a very intensive and challenging process. Intermittent network problems are even more difficult to troubleshoot as the problem occurs at random timeswith a random duration, making it very hard to capture the necessary information, perform troubleshooting, identify and resolve the network problem.

While Network Analyzers help reveal problems in a network data flow, they are limited to examining usually only one network link at a time, thus seriously limiting the ability to examine multiple network segments continuously.

Colasoft’s nChronos is equipped with a neat feature called multi-segment analysis, providing an easy way for IT network engineers and administrators to compare the performance between different links. IT network engineers can improve network performance by enhancing the capacity of the link according to the comparison.

Let’s take a look how we can use Colasoft nChronos’s multi-segment analysis feature to help us detect and deal effectively with our network problems.

Multi-segment analysis provides concurrent analysis for conversations across different links, from which we can extract valuable information on packet loss, network delay, data retransmission and more.

To being, we open nChronos Console and select a portion of the trend chart in the Link Analysis window, then from the Summary window below, we right-click one conversation under the IP Conversation or TCP Conversation tab. From the pop-up menu, selectMulti-Segment Analysis to open the Multi-Segment Analysis window:

Figure 1. Launching Multi-Segment Analysis in nChronos

In the Multi-Segment Analysis window, select a minimum of two and maximum of three links, then choose the stream of interest for multi-segment analysis:

Figure 2. Selecting a stream for multi-segment analysis in nChronos

When choosing a conversation for multi-segment analysis, if any of the other selected network links has the same conversation, it will be selected and highlighted automatically. In our example, the second selected link does not have the same data from the primary selected conversation and therefore there is no data to display in the lower section of the analysis window.

Next, Click Start to Analyze to open the Multi-Segment Detail Analysis window, as shown in the figure below:

Figure 3. Performing Multi-Segment analysis in nChronos

The Multi-Segment Detail Analysis section on the left provides a plethora of parameter statistics (analyzed below), a time sequence chart, and there’s a packet decoding pane on the lower right section of the window.

The left pane provides statistics on uplink and downlink packet loss, uplink and downlink network delay, uplink and downlink retransmission, uplink and downlink TCP flags, and much more.

The time sequence chart located at the top, graphically displays the packet transmission between the network links, with the conversation time displayed on the horizontal axis.

When you click on a packet on the time sequence chart, the packet decoding pane will display the detailed decoding information for that packet.

Using the Multi-Segment Analysis feature, Colasoft’s nChronos allows us to quickly compare the performance between two or morenetwork links. If you’re a network administrator, engineer or IT manager, we strongly suggest you try out nChronos today and see how easy you can discover and deal with network problems.